The workers are dealing with deaths. They're dealing with a lot of hospitalizations where all of a sudden, sometimes in the middle of the day and the middle of the night, they can't breathe.

At Gofer Resource, a smelting plant in Tampa, hundreds of workers were exposed for years to dangerously high levels of lead.

At times, the lead concentration in the air was hundreds of times above the federal limit and considered to be life threatening.

No one had ever told them that their lab reports said that they had had possible kidney damage. No one had ever told them that their lead levels were dangerous and could cause them harm.

Tampa Bay Times reporters Corey Johnson, Rebecca Wellington and Eli Murray poured through thousands of pages of documents, regulatory reports, and employee medical records.

We, the journalists, were some of the first people to tell them about their lab reports and what they specifically meant.

Johnson joins me to discuss the findings of Poison, the new investigative series from the Tampa Bay Times, in collaboration with Frontlines Local Journalism Initiative.

I'm Rainy Aronson and this is the Frontline Dispatch.

The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence in journalism, and by the WGBH Catalyst Fund.

The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence in journalism, and by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Hagler.

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Corey, it's great to be connected again about this really important story that you and your team have been working on for so long.

Well, thank you. Thank you for having us and thank you for all the support you've given to us over the last year and a half, two years now. It's been great.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's been our pleasure. I know that this has been, you know, more than 18 months in the making, and I just want to go back to a meeting that you and I had with Eli and Rebecca sitting in Tampa.

But you guys were pouring over documents with me, but you also showed me this incredible video that you had been given by a worker from this plant.

And I hope we could just talk about that right away. Like, what kind of images were you starting to see in documents that led you to think that this was a really big story.

We started to get a video of this one guy who worked in the furnace had this incredible video of how dusty the area was.

And so one of the first things that we learned that was striking was that when you go into this plant, there's all this brown dust everywhere.

And it looks like dirt. And the worker explained that it wasn't dirt. It was lead.

And he had this video to show how bad the ventilation problems that the workers were dealing with.

They have these really sophisticated events that are supposed to suck this brown lead dust out of the workspace.

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